SUMMARY
This paper will offer some examples to explain the understanding of closely related languages. The traditional contrastive research in studying Estonian and Finnish has above all been based on similarities which have been studied on the level of, e.g., morphemes. However, resemblance is actually more holistic in nature. A rather new perspective on the intelligibility of closely related languages is that of receptive multilingualism. It refers to such communication where speakers use their L1s and understand the L1s of others. Common elements are often recognized in texts as well: cognates facilitate reading comprehension. The results of various translation tests show that the perceived similarity leads to different comprehension results in single items and in texts. Semantic relationships in phraseological units should also be considered and possibilities of improving mutual intelligibility by utilising semantic regularities will be discussed.